I recently purchased a car USB / SD / MMC / MP3 / CD PLAYER with FM/AM radio and whilst I also purchased a 2gb SD card to dump some of my music onto I have been thinking that perhaps I could use an old 80gb hard drive to store all my music onto and wire it up so I could have it in my car(I do realize that it takes a while for a car player to read that much data). To perhaps help me with that I purchased a USB 2.0 To IDE 2.5"/3.5" Adaper Cable+Power Supply, those items are used to turn a hard drive into an external hard drive(I`m thinking that before I use it in the car I can try and rescue some photos etc that I lost when I had to replace the hard drive). The last items are here.

Will this work in the car? Will the power supply work from the 12 volt car battery to supply me with the needed volts and amps (12 volts and 5 amps)?

Here's what a friend of mine told me concerning your problem, roos....


"Sounds like a good idea. I checked with my programmer
friend who said it could work. The disc must be FAT-16
or FAT-32 formatted (Windows 98, not NTFS like Win2000
or XP) and there needs to be some kind of shockmount
for the disk as they do not care to be jarred. The
vehicle will easily supply 12V 5A but of course there
is a 'gotcha' - the connection needs to be fused with
very good surge protection as vehicle power tens to
see a lot of spikes & surges - up to 60V if the
battery is disconnected while the motor is running!
The cigarette lighter socket will supply enough power
but I'm unsure where to get an off the shelf surge
protector."

Thanks very much Ktstew. I was thinking about the surge protection problem today and was hoping that if I use the above mentioned adapter,the one that converts 240v to 12v and 5 amps, surges shouldn`t be a problem,but whether the adapter will transfer the 12v and 5 amp from the battery is a concern. Lol now I`m thinking that perhaps I will have to install a 12 volts to 240 volts transformer in the engine bay. I`m all over the place with this one at the moment.